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Oh please, don't act as if "fundamentalist" didn't have negative connotations in English. Fundamentalist Christians may decide to identify themselves with that

Oh please, don't act as if "fundamentalist" didn't have negative connotations in English. Fundamentalist Christians may decide to identify themselves with that word, but I've never heard of a FLOSS group calling themselves "Fundamentalist Open-Sourcers". Besides, the insult was not merely in that term, but also considering a "problem" (for him, maybe!) that some Linux users may want to keep their systems pure in terms of no-proprietary software (thus maintaining the Four Freedoms for their whole system), and complaining that popular venues in the community won't advertise his product for being closed-source, which is entirely their prerogative.

DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
> Oh please, don't act as if "fundamentalist" didn't have negative connotations in English. You may have misunderstood my point. Based on the assumption that the OP wants to avoid unintended insults, I was pointing out the issues one could associate with using "fundamentalist" as a term of derision. I'm not trying to play PC-police. I was just raising the point in case the OP would want to know. tl;dr There are many English words that basically indicate membership in a particular group. Using those words as a term of derision is a slight against the target of those words and the original group. E.g., "vandal", "gyp", or "hysterical". Or to whit, treating "fundamentalist" as synonymous with blind dogmatism.
- TuringTest 8y ago
  Ah, thanks for clarification.
- dmurray 8y ago
  Is "vandal" really politically incorrect these days? As far as I can tell from Wikipedia the Vandal people have died out and there is no one left to take offence from having their ethnic name associated with property damage.
  - DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
    > Is "vandal" really politically incorrect these days? I have no idea. I'm not sure if most persons' definition of "politically correct" is sufficiently nuanced to cover this application.
hitekker 8y ago
It sounds like the author hit a little too close to home.

DoofusOfDeath 8y ago

> Oh please, don't act as if "fundamentalist" didn't have negative connotations in English. You may have misunderstood my point. Based on the assumption that the OP wants to avoid unintended insults, I was pointing out the issues one could associate with using "fundamentalist" as a term of derision. I'm not trying to play PC-police. I was just raising the point in case the OP would want to know. tl;dr There are many English words that basically indicate membership in a particular group. Using those words as a term of derision is a slight against the target of those words and the original group. E.g., "vandal", "gyp", or "hysterical". Or to whit, treating "fundamentalist" as synonymous with blind dogmatism.

TuringTest 8y ago
Ah, thanks for clarification.
dmurray 8y ago
Is "vandal" really politically incorrect these days? As far as I can tell from Wikipedia the Vandal people have died out and there is no one left to take offence from having their ethnic name associated with property damage.
- DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
  > Is "vandal" really politically incorrect these days? I have no idea. I'm not sure if most persons' definition of "politically correct" is sufficiently nuanced to cover this application.

hitekker 8y ago

It sounds like the author hit a little too close to home.